Teaching
The University's five schools are Law, Humanities, Arts and Languages, Business, and Science and Medicine. Each of these is presided over by a Dean.
One feature of the University that has attracted notice is its continuation of the tradition of "tutorial" teaching (i.e. very small group teaching) which its founders brought over from the University of Oxford. While there are seminars and lectures, much of the teaching is done in small groups of 4 to 8 students, with one member of staff. The staff-student ratio is 1:7.8, which is high among UK universities. The Times Good University Guide (2009) notes that "one-to-one tutorials, which have almost died out elsewhere, with the exception of Oxbridge...are quite common at Buckingham".
The quality of the University's provision is maintained, as at other UK universities, by an external examiner system (i.e., professors from other universities oversee and report on exams and marking), by an academic advisory council (comprising a range of subject-specialist academics from other universities), and by membership of the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA).
The Department of Education has two aspects, research and vocational: it conducts research into education and school provision (see above), and also maintains various PGCE courses, for teacher training. The Department of Education is home to some of the most prominent educationalists in Britain, including Professor Chris Woodhead (former head of Ofsted), Professor Anthony O'Hear (director of the Royal Institute of Philosophy), and Professor Alan Smithers. Its postgraduate certificate in education – which deals with both the state and the independent sector – is accredited with Qualified Teacher Status which means that it also qualifies graduates to teach in the state sector.
The University was created as a liberal arts college, and the major humanities subjects such as history and politics are offered with economics as a degree in international studies. Economics, however, is available as a stand-alone degree. So too is English literature, as a single honours subject, and in combinations with English Language, or Journalism, and related areas. The Professor of Economics, and Dean of Humanities, Professor Martin Ricketts, is the chair of the Institute of Economic Affairs Academic Advisory Council.
Some degree programmes at Buckingham, Law for example, place greater emphasis on exams as an assessment method rather than coursework, but in general its degree programmes balance assessment between exams and coursework.
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Famous quotes containing the word teaching:
“It is by teaching that we teach ourselves, by relating that we observe, by affirming that we examine, by showing that we look, by writing that we think, by pumping that we draw water into the well.”
—Henri-Frédéric Amiel (1821–1881)
“There is no teaching until the pupil is brought into the same state or principle in which you are; a transfusion takes place; he is you, and you are he; then is a teaching; and by no unfriendly chance or bad company can he ever lose the benefit.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“It may be that through habit these do best,
Coming to water clumsily undressed
Yearly; teaching their children by a sort
Of clowning; helping the old, too, as they ought.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)